then as always, interested him profoundly, but only in so far as they led to practical results.  It might be truer to say that philosophy was at no time more than the handmaid of theology to him.  At this period he was in the thick of his struggle to attain certainty with regard to the nature and extent of the Christian revelation, and what he sought at Brook Farm was the leisure and quiet and opportunity for solitude which could not be his at home.  “Lead me into Thy holy Church, which I now am seeking,” he writes as the final petition of the prayer with which the first bulky volume of his diary opens.  With the burden of that search upon him, it was not possible for such a nature as his to plunge with the unreserve which is the condition of success into any study which had no direct reference to it.  We find him complaining at frequent intervals that he cannot give his studies the attention they demand.  Nor were his labors as the community baker of long continuance.  They left him too little time at his own disposal, and in a short time he became a full boarder, and occupied himself only as his inclinations directed.

It may occur to some of our readers to wonder why a man like Brownson, who was then fast nearing the certainty he afterwards attained, should have sent a youth like Isaac Hecker to Brook Farm.  It must be remembered that Brownson’s road to the Church was not so direct as that of his young disciple, nor so entirely free in all its stages from self-crippling considerations.  As we shall presently see, by an abstract of one of his sermons, preached in the spring of 1843, which was made by Isaac Hecker at the time, Brownson thought it possible to hold all Catholic truth and yet defer entering the Church until she should so far abate her claims as to form a friendly alliance with orthodox Protestantism on terms not too distasteful to the latter.  He was not yet willing to depart alone, and hoped by waiting to take others with him, and he was neither ready to renounce wholly his private views, nor to counsel such a step to young Hecker.  He was in harmony, moreover, with the tolerant and liberal tendency which influenced the leading spirits at Brook Farm.  Although he never became one of the community, he had sent his son Orestes there as a pupil, and was a frequent visitor himself.  Their aims, as expressed in a passage which we subjoin from The Dial of January, 1842, were assuredly such as would approve themselves to persons who fully accepted what they believed to be the social teaching of our Lord, but who had not attained to any true conception of the Divine authority which clothes that teaching: